[NOTE: This record of what has been posted to PEIRCE-L
has been nodified by omission of redundant quotations in
the messages. both for legibility and to save space.
-- Joseph Ransdell, PEIRCE-L manager/owner]

* Thirdness => deflation.
*At least and in an animist way, just for the sake of argumentation, I attribute intelligence to thirdness and name it The Devil.

Now, I will really need help from others in the list to figure out with ones are the categories , that doesn't fit well with Peirce's ideas, so, we could change then, and become able to apply the Peircean's philosophic tools to the questions.

It occurred to me on re-reading your message that maybe you might have been trying to start up your project here a bit at the "wrong end" of things...

You might perhaps like to have a look (if you haven't already, that is) at Peirce's article "Evolutionary Love", the online version of which you can find a link to here:

http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.htm

There Peirce notes, amongst other things:

" The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians. It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity than has any other science. Well, political economy has its formula of redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and leads to the summum bonum, food in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence. I do not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate conclusions of political economy, the scientific character of which I fully acknowledge. But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will often temporarily encourage generalizations extremely false, as the study of physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that the great attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe."

He goes on to write later in the same piece that:

" Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.

Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could not conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession will probably shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of evolution -- so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were possible to believe in agapasm without believing it warmly, that fact would be an argument against the truth of the doctrine. At any rate, since the warmth of feeling exists, it should on every account be candidly confessed; especially since it creates a liability to one-sidedness on my part against which it behooves my readers and me to be severally on our guard. "

Having thus introduced the basic notion of an "agapastic" understanding of evolution, he later goes on to introduce two others: anacastic and tychastic evolution:

" Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism."

These three categories, or "modes of evolution", standing for "absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love" as principles of an evolutionary "developmental teleology" can be quite easily seen as directly related to Peirce's ontological/ phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.

A useful book in this connection is Carl Hausman's "Charles S. Peirce's evolutionary Philosophy"

The online digests have already been so useful that
I thought you might want to look again at the Mhonarc
email-to-html converter that many other discussion groups
use for threaded archiving. I don't know if you still have
your tech support person, but I get the impression that this
one is pretty easy to configure several different ways and can
be run fairly independently of whatever archiver came with Lyris.

This makes it possible to search through all the subject lines
over an extended period of time with a simple <find in page>.
It helps, though, for the user to set his/her disk cache size
high enough to keep a copy of the index page around after the
first read since last change.

Having these sorts of facilities, that are are moreover visible
to web searches, as the Lyris archive is not, is a big part of
building up a cumulative and reusable discourse base.

Thanks, Jon, for the suggestion about the MHonArc converter and threader
(see your message below). One problem in this connection is that I no
longer have the basis I was hoping to have of a computer support person I
could count on. This disappeared with the change in the situation in the
philosophy department here. (As I remarked earlier, I can't go into detail
on that change here, but I should emphasize that it had nothing to do with
me or with PEIRCE-L or the Arisbe website.) It seems to me, though, that
the experience with lyris and with the inaability or unwillingness of the
computer service people at TTU to keep it working properly means that
something must be done about that, i.e. the the listserver must either be
located elsewhere or else abandoned in favor of a web-based system of some
kind.

Now, the MHonArc system can be set up in connection with a listserver (by
having a feed from it into MHonArc) or independently of that, provided that
it has a database of its own to work with. I don't know the details
exactly, but I think that is the way it is. It will make a difference,
then, how the listserver problem is solved. But, in any case, there is no
starightforward solution to it now, as there would have been if the
arrangements in the department had held up. The problem also involves the
website Arisbe. I don't know to what extent the ISP that hosts it will be
willing to along with the installation of something like Monarch in
connection with it, in case the integration of MHonArc with the website
would be a part of what is wanted. I daresay the installation of MHonArc
itself can probably be done by drawing upon some computer expertise on the
list. So the problem is not with it and its installation but rather with
not knowing at this point what is to be locted where.

I just mention these complications to bear in mind. I am investigating some
other possibilities as well which I will tell you about in a couple of days
when I get this paper I am trying to complete in the mail for the
proceedings CD it is going into. Meanwhile further discussion of this and
other options is in order at any time. i haven't yet had time to check out
the Moodle thing that Patrick suggests. If you -- or whoever else might
find it interesting -- would check that out to see whether it makes sense
for our purposes or not.
Joe Ransdell

Initially I want to thank you your fineness of having sent me last year
your important article 'Peirce's Inkstand as an External Embodiment of
Mind'.0

I apologize by my so long silence, but I assure to you that I have read=
it carefully. Particularly your two preliminary claims - as well as the
concept of "virtual localization- they constitute, for me, important

In your work you wrote
"My second claim is that Peirce's quotation is echoed in Karl Popper's
later doctrine that human knowledge depends on the evolution of
exosomatic organs, such as pens, pencils, typewriters and computers;..."

Being you an historian of ideas, I ask you:

. Do you suppose that these "orality-literacy transformations" could be
topologically represented (logical and geometrically) by means of
Burch's notation in his 'A foundation for semeiotic'?

. That would allow us to understand different literacy processes in
different cultures?

and:

. It would be that notation a exosomatic organ (or a machine maybe)?

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Armando
---

You wrote: =20

> Jon, Joe, et al.,
>
> I have not yet had a chance to read Joe's paper, and so cannot comment on it
> yet. For now, thanks to Joe for the detailed attention paid to my aper.
> However, since I downloaded this message from a different computer from the one
> I most often use, I want to make one comment on it while I have it before me -
> speak of exosomatic constraints on communication!
>
> Whatever I may have said about the exosomatic-endosomatic distinction in 1996 or an
> endosomatic-exosomatic dichotomy to Peirce. As I put it, "You find the mind
> where there are inkstands or other means of expressing thoughts, paper or other
> vehicles for preserving and conveying thoughts, and of course brains capable,
> through the intermediaries of eyes and hands or the equivalent, of interacting
> with external tools and media." (Peirce's Inkstand as an External Embodiment of
> Mind, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXXV, no. 3(1999), p.
> 553.)
>
> More later,
> Peter

The original denomination of Robert Burch's work was: *A Peircean =
Reduction Thesis and the Foundations of Topological logic: A FOUNDATION =
FOR SEMEIOTIC*. Robert gave me one copy before exposing it in the 'C. S. =
Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress' with the title: 'Peirce's Reduction =
Theorem Explicated and Proved'. That work (jointly with his 'Peirce on =
the Application of Relations to Relations') is in our Max Fisch Library. =